How marketers are bracing for an increasingly privacy-conscious world

Earlier this year, Apple Inc unveiled a giant billboard in Las Vegas that took a jab at rival tech titans present in full force at CES 2019. The hoarding that covered the side of a Vegas building read, “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.” Adland’s version of an amuse-bouche, a taste of Apple’s global advertising salvo that puts individual privacy front and centre. A commercial followed soon after. Two men in deep discussion abruptly stop when a waitress comes over to their table and other such instances of private space invasions are depicted in the slick and fast-paced film that ends with the line “If privacy matters in your life, it should matter to the phone your life is on.” And then boldly declares, “Privacy. That’s iPhone.”

Privacy has always been a big part of Apple’s pitch to consumers. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that, at a time when privacy pivots are all the rage and stages from Cannes to Chennai are chockablock with “your privacy matters to us” rhetoric, Apple is one of the first to take the privacy pitch mainstream, into ads – billboards, YouTube and everywhere in between. Though Facebook issued apology print ads last year, that reiterated its commitment to protecting private data. Since the Facebook - Cambridge Analytica debacle, Mark Zuckerberg and Co have been on a worldwide apology tour for the many data-breach scandals that affected brand Zuck and stocks.

In the tech space, talking about privacy is a matter of hygiene, a routine task like brushing your teeth while staring blankly into the mirror. Particularly now with every day bringing more news of data breaches, sketchy apps tracking and sucking in your personal information, spying smart speakers and whatnot. But the question is, as we move to an increasingly privacy-conscious world, how long before the privacy pitch enters other consumer categories and commercials?

The Greater Luxury Good

Categories most likely to be affected are ones where trust is an important component or the main commodity, and where a deficit of the virtue is a matter of grave concern. Social media and technology - especially in-home surveillance technology, banking and finance, insurance, anything that touches and intersects personal and private such as medicine and psychology and so on, says Faris Yakob founder & principal at Genius Steals. Some marketers will put privacy at the front of brands’ pitch to consumers, he believes. Like Apple has, “to carve out a consumer-centric champion position in the current climate where brands can seem predatory.” But the problem with privacy is that “for most people, cost and convenience will trump privacy, making it a luxury good, unfortunately.”

Echoing Yakob’s sentiments Alexandra Dimiziani, co-founder and global managing partner, TwentyFirstCenturyBrand and former global marketing director of Airbnb says that the teeter-totter is in flux for most people and only the most concerned with privacy and security are willing to compromise the benefits that brands deliver. But the shift is underway, and has been for some years now, “we see evidence of it in brands' behaviours, with more and more taking a clear stance and beginning to roll out principles and protocols that give primacy to consumers' privacy.”

Regardless of where consumers are on the maturity scale, how much your privacy matters to you right you shouldn’t matter to responsible marketers. According to Shoumyan Biswas, former CMO and head of Loyalty, Partnerships & Advertising for Flipkart, usage of "Big Data" is not devoid of "Big Challenges". The other big P - Personalisation, “if not done well can often be intrusive and borderline creepy. It can also compromise the magic potion we are all after - "consumer trust" by ways of breach, misuse and even stealing of personal information.” Wrongly chipping away at data would cause long-term erosion of trust that would be hard to repair and impossible to reverse. Let’s Talk About Privacy, Baby

Even if marketers and markets aren’t ready for a festive offer on the big, smart telly and IoT fridges and homes that come with Privacy guarantees, they should be putting in place measures for a time when privacy will be more important to a lot more consumers and not just those of us with tech magazine subscriptions.

Aside from the changing regulatory environment, consumers, too, are more aware of how much data they share and while they are ok with sharing, they seek transparency, consistency, and a clear value add in exchange, says Biswas. He adds, “We are fast approaching a stage where Data Security will no longer be a smart choice but a core principle in everything we do.” For starters, he suggests the adoption of privacy as a core design principle. Have the highest standards of privacy built into every step of data collection, storage, sharing, and analysis. “This may compromise effectiveness and scale in the short term but will protect privacy.”

According Rob Norman, independent director and senior advisor to GroupM, marketers, in general, cannot use privacy as a USP. “None are immune to error or criminality. What they can do is build trustworthy relationships built on reliability, competence, integrity, and empathy (as Rachel Botsman, from Oxford University, would say).”

If empathy fails, you could just buy space on a building and mount a giant billboard that shouts “Your Privacy, Our Priority.”